Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Her Body, My Baby

It was pretty much inevitable that Alex Kuczynski’s article on surrogacy (Nov. 30) would inspire contempt and ridicule in the blog­osphere. After all, she is beautiful, slim, wealthy and cheerfully unapologetic about it all; she does not try very hard to deflect envy. But grief is grief no matter how much money you have, and I can say with certainty — having struggled with infertility myself, and having been criticized for being a privileged New Yorker who threw lots of money at the problem (and wrote about it) — that Kuczynski’s sadness and feelings of emptiness could not be washed away by her millions. Yes, ultimately money did help her solve her problem — most of us, myself included, could not have afforded innumerable rounds of IVF and, when all else failed, gotten a womb for hire. And yes, she could have adopted, she could have been child-free, she could have done many things.

But Kuczynski had the audacity to write honestly about wanting to replicate her own DNA at any cost, and for that she was punished. At any rate, what was shocking, and inexcusable to me, was The Times’s complicity in creating the Park Avenue Princess narrative: I mean, of all the photos taken, were the ones of the perfectly groomed Kuczynski next to the lovely but bovine surrogate really the most representative of the text? The surrogate couldn’t have been dressed elegantly, too? Or, more damning, the photo of Kuczynski on her perfectly manicured Southampton lawn, holding her $150K baby, with the black nanny standing grimly in the background, ready to whisk that baby away at the first sign that he was mussing Mom’s perfectly coiffed ’do?

Kuczynski was naïve enough to pose for those photos, it’s true. But did they really tell the story of the text? I don’t think they did. They did, however, relay the feelings of the people who edited the magazine.

JUDITH NEWMANNew York

I’m glad Alex Kuczynski has her baby, but I wonder if it occurred to either the writer or her editors that the story leaves The Times open to the charges of elitism leveled at it during the recent presidential campaign. She and her husband, “a very successful investor,” can afford three houses, including a ski home in Idaho and a summer house in Southampton, so paying $25,000 for another woman to carry their baby is not a problem. During her “pregnancy,” the writer boasts she raced down a mountain on skis at 60 miles an hour, Olympic-gold-medal speed, and did Bikram yoga twice a day right until the other woman gave birth to her baby. Fascinating details, but the article reads more like parody than serious journalism, especially the photograph of the author with her baby and dark-skinned servant on the lawn of her house in the Hamptons.

If prostitution is unethical, immoral and illegal, why is it O.K. for one woman to pay for the use of another woman’s body? If it’s unethical, immoral and illegal to buy and sell body parts for transplantation, why is it O.K. to rent a uterus? Our morality seems so malleable in the hands of those who feel entitled.

Whatever the other issues involved, there is something profoundly wrong with our educational and economic systems when a middle-class, two-income family has a daughter selling her eggs and a mother selling her uterus to pay for college.

SHIRA SAPERSTEINTakoma Park, Md.

I am filled with revulsion by Alex Kuczynski’s cover story. I find it unconscionable that in an era with so many children who cannot find homes there are rich, white, educated couples who can pay $25,000 so that another woman, living in far less well-off circumstances, can go through the physical ordeal and emotional pain of having and giving up her baby. Yes, it is her baby, not Alex Kuczynski’s. We are now so far from nature, morality and ethics that the violations of human bonds and trust are not even a consideration. Kuczynski wants a baby? Kuczynski must have a baby — who will look like her husband, who will satisfy some crazed yearning for a genetic variant of herself. I have never liked the idea that a “contract” trumps nature.

LYNDA SWANSONDaly City, Calif.

I don’t underestimate the pain of Alex Kuczynski’s infertility nor the joy her new baby will bring. I’m just disappointed in The Times for missing the point. Kuczynski, a recovering cosmetic-surgery addict, represents what the rich have become: an elite fringe that is so far flung from the majority of society as to seem freakish. And Cathy, the surrogate mother, represents how the once-stalwart middle class has diminished: an educated person who is relegated to selling space in her body to help pay for her own child’s education (surrogacy may feel like a gift, but it is a job). What could have been a discourse on class, feminism, bioethics, was instead a dull, self-indulgent, one-sided confessional from the one with the name and the income. There’s a good story here, but the wrong person told it.

HANNAH HENRYNapa, Calif.

In words that echo Aristotle’s view that a woman is a receptacle for the life force implanted by a man through intercourse, the author refers to Cathy Hilling as “the woman who carried our child” and explains, “Strictly speaking, she was a vessel, the carrier, the biological baby sitter, for my baby.” The title of the article, “Her Body, My Baby,” engages in the same obliterating action, with the author as the stand-in life-force impregnator, situated outside the nine-month process of creating a child but claiming responsibility for and complete ownership of the result. And Kuczynski perceives Cathy as participating in this reduction of her role when she likens herself to an Easy-Bake oven.

That simplistic formulation of so-called gestational surrogacy (“organ rental,” per Kuczynski) may have helped two strangers leap over chasms they couldn’t have traversed otherwise. But it is a shortcut that relies on denigrating concepts, concepts that have historically led to inhumane treatment. As infertility and intervention increasingly muddy the meaning of the word “mother,” we must traverse that terrain and not take shortcuts.

A woman’s body and the growing being inside her participate in an astounding symphony for about 40 weeks to build from egg and sperm a human that can survive outside the woman’s body. The woman’s feelings, thoughts, meals and actions influence that symphony, helping create what the growing being experiences at every moment. Yet Kuczynski literally reduces Cathy’s whole self to her uterus. This is a disturbing denigration of a beautiful, astoundingly complex phenomenon that builds life and that bonds most living beings and their offspring for life.

JANET BENTONWyncote, Pa.

By publishing Alex Kuczynski’s wildly self-absorbed account of her “adventure” with surrogate pregnancy, The New York Times does a disservice to couples who have wrestled with the heartache of infertility. Kuczynski would have better served her subject by writing the story about someone who was not fabulously wealthy and who perhaps had to make some compromise or sacrifice in pursuit of motherhood. Her obtuseness shows in her decision to be photographed for the story, holding her baby with her uniformed “baby nurse” nearby. Presumably the nurse will allow her to continue to raft on Level 10 rapids without the burden of the physicality of parenting. By printing this bizarre, atypical account, The Times shows no respect for those less entitled who have confronted infertility and the morally complex options available to fulfill the desire to love and nurture a child.

To conclude that Kuczynski is a 75 percent mother is both insulting to herself and to all parents who love and raise children in a nontraditional family. Grief for the loss of the ability to experience pregnancy and birth needs to be acknowledged and deserves recognition as part of her family’s story. But to use such simple calculations, hmmm, do the math — am I a 50 percent parent because my children are adopted? What is the grandparent who raises a grandchild — a 25 percent parent? When my sons cried their eyes out at the recent death of their father (by adoption), I can assure you it was not half-heartfelt.

You are already subscribed to this email.

From the photographs Gillian Laub took to illustrate the cover article by Kuczynski, you might easily conclude that the author is a rich young woman who can buy a baby the way other people buy a dress. This is partly right. To the author’s credit, she does not stint on unflattering details while telling the complex story of how she came to meet and employ Cathy Hilling, who became her friend over the year in which they cooperated in the effort to bring a baby into the world.

Kuczynski is a good writer. Laub is a good photographer. But who decided to combine their work this way? And what is Kuczynski’s sin, exactly? Aside from affluence, talent, a good figure and luck?

MARY PANZER New York

As an adoptive parent, I expected to be sympathetic to this cover article. Instead I find I am appalled by it. Leaving aside the very real moral issues of surrogacy, which I view as similar to those involving organ donation, the selfishness exhibited by the author is amazing. Has it never occurred to her that her son may not want every parent, teacher and student in every school he ever attends to know his birth story? Does she think he will never read this? Is privacy something she doesn’t feel her child is allowed?

And what decision maker is responsible for showing the surrogate barefoot? This one picture belies all the careful respect the article seems to afford her choice. She is the hillbilly who needs to “rent her womb” — the barefoot-and-pregnant stereotype. No matter what the words say, the picture speaks louder.

I hope the money the author earned for this article was worth it. I think she and the woman who helped her have a son will regret this forever.

JOANNE MCCARTHYMadison, N.J.

I enjoyed the thoughtful account of Alex Kuczynski’s experience of achieving motherhood with a surrogate.

She was very honest as she charted the progress she made in reconciling some of the less-than-charitable preconceptions that she had about surrogacy. She clearly illustrated that the surrogate mother, Cathy, is intelligent and was frank about the financial incentive. Why then did you choose to contrast the women with photographs that are such an obvious cliché?

CYNTHIA MARTINSeattle

It was 10 years ago this month when I stood in the elevator at Bloomingdale’s with my 1-month-old son. The other women in the elevator commented on my ability to fit into my jeans with such a young baby. I smiled and replied, “I didn’t gain a lot of weight before he was born.” The secret of my newly adopted son was safe. I didn’t realize until now, in my mid-40s, the many benefits of being “pregnantless.” And we all know what Kuczynski stated, that it’s not the nine months of pregnancy that make you a mother but everything after that.

My firstborn was conceived in the usual way and delivered after an uneventful pregnancy. Genetically perfect and robustly healthy, he was nevertheless born with a rare brain disorder, most likely the result of an as-yet-unidentified, symptomless virus that passed through my body undetected during the early weeks of his gestation. I wonder how often — if at all — privileged parents who acquire their children through the medically, financially and ethically extreme measures described by Alex Kuczynski consider the possibility that things may not go according to even the best-laid (and paid-for) plans. Who bears the blame, and the burden, when the hard-won trophy arrives in less-than-mint condition?

JEAN BROOKMANBranford, Conn.

While I was fascinated by Alex Kuczynski’s article about her journey to motherhood, I was bothered by one particular aspect of the article that she seemingly glosses over. Kuczynski mentions that Rebecca, the daughter of Cathy, her surrogate, “had been an egg donor to help pay her college tuition.” As a woman and recent Ivy League graduate who has been courted by couples and organizations advertising for egg donors in campus publications, I was both intrigued and horrified by this statement. Intrigued because, admittedly, my friends and I would occasionally half-joke that if our finances ever got so bad, we could always sell our eggs; horrified that many young women in this country have apparently had no choice but to turn to the invasive and emotionally complicated procedure of harvesting their eggs to pay for the exorbitant costs of higher education.

While our nation can be proud of the technology that we developed to give children to the childless and recognize the profound fulfillment that children bring to families, we should also be ashamed by what students resort to in order to pay for something that should be a right for us all.

ISABELLE ROSTAIN Philadelphia

A version of this letter appears in print on , on Page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Her Body, My Baby. Today's Paper|Subscribe